Fandom vs Money-makers: Round the latest.
Oh dear. The latest episode in "Why Making Money From Fandom Doesn't Work For Non-Fans" is starting up. Grab your seats early, and tune in to the fun, as Keith Mander attempts to monetize LOTR fandom.

Mr Manders starts from a bit of a handicap. For a start, he isn't actually a member of fandom. So he doesn't know the first thing about the history, the background, or the little nuances of the place. He doesn't know the politics, and he doesn't know who to believe when they tell him "yeah, you can do this". For seconds, he apparently doesn't know the first thing about the IP holders either. This means he is blindfolded in the ring with the archetypical sabre-toothed-tiger with a toothache, and he thinks he's dealing with a cute, fuzzy kitten.

This guy is, to use a Discworldism, going to be cheesed (like being creamed, but it goes on for much longer, and the results are rotten).

The idea of monetarizing fandom isn't new. It isn't even novel. However, it seems that lately, there's a lot of people wandering around looking at the size and scope of fandom (now that it's a bit more visible than it was previously) and thinking "there's got to be gold in them thar hills".

They're right. There is money in fandom. However, they're making the mistake of thinking the money is up for claim by anyone who walks by. It isn't. What money there is in fandom (and I think a large majority of fans would agree with me here) should mostly be up for claim by the original creator or creators of the content which inspired the fanworks. A lot of fans are insistent about being in this for the fun and games, the shits and giggles, or just the love of the original work. I'm one of them. The wider culture of fandom is a gift culture, where we make our works for the fun of it, rather than to make money.

The popular vision of an online group which "makes money from fanfiction" is The Pit of Voles. However, one of the things which people forget about this is that it too has its origins in the gift culture - Xing, the original creator of FF.net, started it as an archive for fanfic because he saw a need and decided to fill it. The history is there on wikipedia, if you want to read it. Basically, like so many of the older services on the internet, ff.net started off as someone's side project, hosted by their employer, and then shifted to paid hosting (and ad content) as a result of growing too large to handle just as a side project. But the beginnings were as a small service created and provided by a guy in California for shits and giggles, because he could, for the love of it (in Xing's case, it was for the love of the programming rather than the fic, but the core principle is the same). By the bye, I doubt ff.net actually makes much more money than is required to cover hosting costs, and maybe one or two wages. I sincerely doubt it's coining huge profits.

Mr Manders isn't starting from this perspective. Mr Manders, according to his own blog posts, is out to "dominate" fandoms, and "create [...] returns". He's in it for the money, not the love of it. He wants to make money (preferably lots of money) from other people's labours of love. He's tried it already, and succeeded, to a small degree. But he isn't interested in enriching the gift culture; he doesn't seem to be interested in giving something back; he doesn't appear to have any aim other than making money. He wants to get rich quick, and he thinks the unpaid labour of fanfiction writers is a good way of creating content to attract eyeballs for advertisers in order to do so. The last time this came around (the FanLib nonsense) I made the point that what was being expected of fanwriters in such a context was an agreement to intellectual slavery - we were to labour and work for nothing so that someone else could make money.

That wasn't a good bargain the first time I heard it. It isn't any better now.

[There's another little thing Mr Manders appears to have forgotten: these days, seeing ads on the internet is very much a voluntary process. I'm using a combination of Firefox, with AdblockPlus, Flashblock and NoScript, and the number of ads I see, no matter where I go online, is minimal. Mainly, I have to admit, because I have everything set to their safest defaults - I don't see ads, I don't see Flash animations, I don't run scripts by default. I have to choose to allow javascript embedded in a site to run. I also get to decide whether this decision is temporary or permanent - for a once-off visit to a site, I'll most likely choose to temporarily allow things. But even then, I'll be choosing to allow things by domain, rather than "allow all on page". Most of this comes from years of being paranoid about viruses and worms - I prefer not to have content I haven't authorised running on my PC. I also don't particularly like ads.]

In the long run, it is possible to make money from fandom. However, I'd speculate this requires the following very important qualities:

1) A strong knowledge of the history of things fannish and the fandom culture;2) A strong knowledge of the history of the particular fandom you're working within (and preferably connections inside it);3) The willing co-operation of the owners of the original IP on which the fanworks are based; and 4) An understanding or obligation to continue providing the service/creating the product even if you don't make money.

I have to admit, I'm half-hoping he carries on with this for long enough to attract the attention of the Tolkien Estate, particularly since he's gone to the trouble of incorporating himself in the UK (which he appears to think is a clever move) in order to dodge copyright lawsuits. Yeah, let us know how that one works out, chum - preferably after the UK-based Tolkien family has finished dragging your US-born-and-bred arse through the courts over there.

Correction: he's actually from the UK (Brighton, to be exact) which means he's probably thought he was doing the right thing. I expect when he figures out precisely how much trouble he's in with the UK legal system, he's going to be hiding under the biggest rock he can find.

I'm sick of their assumption that everyone in fandom is either extremely innocent (and thus unable to recognise a money-making opportunity for same) or just plain dumb (and thus unable to recognise a money-making opportunity at all). I'm also sick of the assumption that we're all fluffy-minded teenagers with no life experience, no business experience, and no actual knowledge of anything outside our own heads.

As I believe I've mentioned before, it's worth noting that when it comes to fandom, we're an extremely diverse group, and if you pick a profession there's likely to be at least one representative (if not more) of that profession in any given group of fans. Sure, certain fandoms may have a larger clump of certain professions (for example, LOTR fandom does tend to be high in geeks and computing types, but that's mainly because there's a pretty high overlap between geekdom and SFF fandom in general) but even so, a person's professional life is no predictor of their home life in anything other than the most general terms.

From all the information we have about this particular "entrepreneur", it appears he is young, extremely privileged (white, male, upper-middle class, educated, USAlien, apparently able-bodied, probably Christian) and therefore extremely ignorant of anything outside the boundaries of his own damn skull. To start with, he appears to believe nobody in the fandom has even the basics of search skills (and thus the rather more candid comments he made over on his blog wouldn't be discovered by the users of the fan-site he's just purchased).

He hoodwinked one rather naive fan-site owner. He's now dealing with the rest of the fan-site users, who appear to be a damn sight less naive and trusting.

The fact that they think we're all young and clueless makes it even more disgusting to me in the sense that they're not only seeking to profit off other people's labor, but off CHILD labor at that, and they see nothing exploitative or wrong about it. All the more satisfying when they suddenly realize what they're actually dealing with.

That he's firmly in the camp of Stupid White Boy doesn't surprise me a bit. There's that certain colonialism to his actions that I cannot forgive. He's invading our space, trying to use us locals as free labor for his profit and about to wreck up everything about our society that made it work. The rest of us don't matter beyond how we can benefit him. Even with fandom tearing him a new one, I still kind of want the Tolkien Estate to nail his ass to the grass. Send a message to the rest of them since clearly they don't respect us enough to listen to fandom itself.

Further research indicates he's actually from the UK, which means I was wrong in one minor particular there (he's not USAlien), but does indicate he comes by the colonialism shtick honestly, at least (says the Aussie).

Fandom does have a well-documented reaction to slick businessbeings and other such exploitative types coming in and treating us like yokels who aren't aware that the rocks we're ploughing out of our vegetable patch are gold nuggets. Generally it's along the lines of "dude, we know they're gold nuggets. They still make it hard to grow the veges. Besides, the land is owned by the family who owns that big castle over there - if they want 'em, they'll come pick 'em up. If we sell them, we're the ones who go to jail."